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Salient: Victoria University Students' Paper. Vol. 24, No. 12. 1961.

A Vision of Hell

A Vision of Hell

A maths teacher has a conversation with his pupil, now a film director (and in prison) about making a film with Hell as its subject. Bergman used this introduction as the basis of a film in which he regarded life itself as a vision of hell. He peopled his conception with a poet, a prostitute, and a pimp and used a treatment in which symbolism, naturalism, nightmares, film within film and violent action and editing make uneasy bedfellows. A confused failure (Bergman called it "a morality play for the cinema"), the diretcor had overreached himself.

Self realisation—father and daughter-in-law, and (below) childhood sweetheart and lover. Two scenes from "Wild Strawberries."

Self realisation—father and daughter-in-law, and (below) childhood sweetheart and lover. Two scenes from "Wild Strawberries."

In 1949, Torst (Thirst) marked a return to a more humane theme.

The main characters, Ruth and Bertie, are travelling through Europe just after the end of the war. Their past lives continually intrude upon the present and their marriage is now reduced to bickering and mutual torment (cf the later couple in Wild Strawberries). Ruth remembers an operation which robbed her of the child of an earlier lover (and planted in her the unquenchable "thirst" of the title); Bertie recalls an affair with the neurotic Viola. But the journey ends with an uneasy reconciliation—both realise that they still have each other and that loneliness is more difficult to bear than anything else.

Erich Ulrichsen has described Thirst as "the film in which Bergman gets closest to real human beings and moves us most." It also provides perhaps the most extended variation on one of his favourite themes: the acute stage in a marriage when love is replaced by uncertainty and distrust. Thanks to the fine playing of Eva Henning and Birger Malmsten (and Bergman's direction), the film becomes a kind of plea for more honesty and decency in personal relationships.